People need to do their due diligence when including open-source software and packages not just when they first use them but anytime you have a need to upgrade them. I highly doubt I'm the first one to think of this, but there really aught to be tool or comprehensive set of tools that routinely scan open-source software and packages for potentially malicious code and alert users of the problem(s).

Can anyone tell me if there are similar risks installing software using Brew on macos? I would imagine so.

A year ago a similar attack was reported and I think that there have been similar campaigns reported this year: https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch/discussions/1290#di...

  - This is a new repository, not a fork
  - All repositories have different contributors and different names
  From the last two points, it becomes clear that even if we find one such repository, we won’t be able to find other similar repositories using it.

In previous campaigns the repositories were linked to a few users. But those users had starred other users, that at the same time had also cloned other repositories with the malware. Sometimes the malicious repository had been cloned from another malicious repo, and if you listed the repositories and "friends" of that user, all were part of the botnet.

Also, github doesn't delete repositories and accounts, they mark them as deleted. If you use their api you can still list them.

> Another month later, GitHub support sent me an email saying that they had removed these repositories.

I recently discovered a campaign where somebody was forking very small but useful codebases, and replacing the distributable with some malware, and making the repository have better SEO with changes to the README. My case was a simple macOS application that could be used to control some Phillips LED light strip.

I reported it to GitHub and it was removed within 24 hours.

I discovered another repository like this, and they still haven't replied since (one month).

No clue how their malware reports work. I'm surprised they don't partner with some antivirus company to at least scan "releases" for malware (not repositories themselves)

I got some source code leaked and added a malware on top of it. Not sure what to do with it

This is a failure of malware flagging systems as well - VT should not return clean if there are any downstream files that are malicious - such as in this case.

I uploaded several of these virus-infected archives to VirusTotal. In each archive, under the “Network Communication” section, the virus makes requests to three resources: a GET request to a website to retrieve IP information, a POST request to a Polygon RPC node (drpc), and a POST request to what appears to be the virus creator’s server. I can only assume that the scheme is designed to steal cryptocurrency.

I added keyoxide proofs everywhere. It's not really protection against victims using the wrong repo, but at least people who look can be certain that the person who controls my domain and website is the same person who controls that particular GitHub account.

>The zip archive contains 4 files: Application.cmd or Launcher.cmd loader.exe or luajit.exe or another_name.exe random_name.cso or random_name.txt lua51.dll If you submit a link to the archive to VirusTotal, it will find 0 viruses. If you submit the zip file itself, it will detect a Trojan inside it.

MS Windows

It will feel very spooky when they stop updating because of this essay .